Apple’s newest hire looks to address Siri’s shortcomings

Looks like Apple want to make sure Siri keeps up with its competition. The tech company has hired Carnegie Mellon University Professor Russ Salakhutdinov to head its team working on artificial intelligence, which is considered a big part of the industry’s future. And if this is your line of work, Salakhutdinov is even hiring people for his team. He’ll also remain as a professor at Carnegie Mellon. One of latest researches involve work on how to better derive context behind the questions people pose. If applied to Apple’s tech, that can come quite handy and perhaps put them back in the running in the virtual assistant space.

Excited about joining Apple as a director of AI research in addition to my work at CMU. Apply to work with my teamhttps://t.co/U2hQl2GdhA

— Russ Salakhutdinov (@rsalakhu) October 17, 2016

 

Source: Recode

Fitbit releases fix for Charge 2 distance tracking issue

Fitbit has admitted to two software issues with the Charge 2 that cause it to incorrectly display the distance it tracks. According to Fitbit one of the issues is related to the Connected GPS and when it’s used with a few modes like wall, hike, or interval. The other is when using multi-sport tracking for run and treadmill activities. The company says they have already fixed the issue through a free software upgrade.

"These software errors caused the tracker to occasionally calculate stats like pace and distance with less precision than we expect from our products," a spokesperson for Fitbit told The Verge via email. 

Kickstarter for Dyslexie font hopes to help out people with dyslexia

It’s impossible to put yourself in the shoes of someone else. So if you don’t understand what it must be like for dyslexics, then we can’t blamed you. But that doesn’t mean you can’t help them out. Christian Boer, a dyslexia sufferer and the man behind Dyslexie, hopes to make it easier for dyslexics to navigate the digital world. He created the typeface Dyslexie and designed the letters in a way that makes it difficult for people to flip or twist them while reading. He used things like letter weights, making them bolder at the base; larger capital letters; and bigger spaces between words. The font is available for Mac and PC users.

But Boer takes this a step further with a Kickstarter campaign for things like creating a PDF converter to change any document typeface into the Dyslexie font and a web browser extension to do the same for web pages. The campaign has around 34 days to go and a bit far from its 35,000 euros (around CA$50,500) target. But if this is something you’d like to get involved in, you can do so here.

Source: Digital Trends

The Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 edge get the Note7’s always-on display feature

Samsung has carried part of the Galaxy Note7 to its two remaining flagships. The Galaxy S7 and S7 edge both get the always-on display feature of the Note. It was done perhaps to make the experience a bit more comfortable for the former Note7 owners. It also helps keep the legacy of the Note device, which might not be a brand Samsung would (or should) retain. Users will be able to customize what’s being displayed on the screen—whether it be a photo, a digital or analogue clock, or notifications. Of course, you can’t expect the S Pen-reliant features to show up. Some users have reported, though, that notifications from Samsung’s email app aren’t showing up.

Source: The Next Web